Starbucks is increasing their prices.
I don’t think that I’ve ever given them a dime of business. If I did, I was purchasing something for someone else. I don’t even drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, if I were the market, there would be no Starbucks (and the economies of several tropical countries would be devastated).
A lot of Freepers seem to agree. Even the coffee drinkers. I like this proposal:
We need a $10 federal excise tax on Starbucks
Starbucks is increasing their prices.
I don’t think that I’ve ever given them a dime of business. If I did, I was purchasing something for someone else. I don’t even drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, if I were the market, there would be no Starbucks (and the economies of several tropical countries would be devastated).
A lot of Freepers seem to agree. Even the coffee drinkers. I like this proposal:
We need a $10 federal excise tax on Starbucks
Starbucks is increasing their prices.
I don’t think that I’ve ever given them a dime of business. If I did, I was purchasing something for someone else. I don’t even drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, if I were the market, there would be no Starbucks (and the economies of several tropical countries would be devastated).
A lot of Freepers seem to agree. Even the coffee drinkers. I like this proposal:
We need a $10 federal excise tax on Starbucks
Are the Democrats taming Markos? I mean, it’s not like this is new stuff. He himself is still remembered for his f-bombing the contractors killed in Fallujah. I have to think it’s about election season, and wanting to become respectable.
It’s been forty years since the Detroit riots on Twelfth Street. We drove down from Flint afterward to look at the damage. I’d never seen a war zone before, but it looked like I imagine one might. A year later, the Tigers came back from a two-game deficit to win the World Series against the Cardinals (the first time in series history that had happened), which went a good way toward healing the city.
Top ten things to hate about Star Trek.
Arnold Kling writes about a movie too subversive to be shown in the public schools:
As a Jew, I am certain that I missed a number of the religious aspects of the movie. There were subtle references to Christian doctrine that went right past me. Perhaps there are Christians who would be more aware of the context and, based on their knowledge, might even take offense at the film’s stance. I imagine that passionate atheists would tend to be turned off. But I think that a typical high school student could be exposed to the religion in “Call of the Entrepreneur” without being permanently scarred or corrupted.
I would argue that “Call of the Entrepreneur” and “An Inconvenient Truth” are both religious films. However, unlike Al Gore’s movie about global warming, “Call of the Entrepreneur” steers clear of sensationalism, dogma, and misleading half-truths. It is ironic that public teachers and parents are happy to see “An Inconvenient Truth” in the classroom, but “Call of the Entrepreneur” would probably be greeted with protests if it were shown.
Yes, times have indeed changed. And not in all ways for the better.
At the NewSpace 2007 luncheon on Thursday, the speaker was Ed Morris, the head of the Office of Commercial Space at the Department of Commerce. In response to a question from Dave Huntsman, he indicated that there might be a possibility of alleviating the situation. Jeff Foust reported on it at the time, and Dave has an interesting comment there, with which I agree. I also agree that while new legislation would help, it’s not necessary to fix some of the things, despite what Morris said.
As I noted on a panel at the Space Access Conference in March, I would like to see the burden of proof shifted for whether or not an item should be on the munitions list. The current standard is guilty until proven innocent. I think that it should be the other way around. And it is encouraging to see some recognition at the Pentagon that the cure is worse than the disease. It has alway been a much more realistic position to “mend it, not end it,” than to simply demand that there be no export controls, and the argument that, in its current implementation, it’s actually damaging our security will be a useful one with its most staunch defenders, such as Duncan Hunter.
[Note: I originally wrote this back on March 7th, but in going through old posts, I noticed that I never published it. The movie has been out a sufficient amount of time now that there are no spoilers…]
OK, so we went and saw the Astronaut Farmer this past weekend (I should add, parenthetically, that it’s the second movie I’ve seen in a theatre since I moved down here, two and a half years ago.
Forget about “suspension of disbelief.” Think complete abandonment of disbelief. On rocketry, on combustion, on radio communications, on basic physics, on how the government works, on how people work, on…almost anything correlating to reality that you want to imagine.
But I’m not panning the movie. As long as you follow my advice, and empty your head of the notion that this is a movie about how a private citizen might actually get into space, it’s an enjoyable flick, and entertaining for the whole family (well, other than a couple naughty words).
Yes, I could spend the evening disquisiting on all the things they got wrong in the flick–the notion that one could launch from a barn without it being a smoldering crater afterward; the notion that a rocket could propel itself a few feet off the ground horizontally for miles, with gravity having no effect; the notion that a Mercury capsule could survive the end of that trip, after being launched off a cliff and roll amidst the desert scrub, intact with its occupant alive; the notion that the government would assemble a team from every conceivable (and several unconceivable) government entities in a high-school gym to determine whether or not he could fly; the notion that a man and his fifteen-year-old son could single (OK, dual) handedly assemble an Atlas-Mercury from antique spare parts scrounged from NASA junkyards and have it work, and not only work, but magically have it land where it took off (even though the original landed in the ocean, and not the desert southwest) after a power failure that was fixed (as all things are fixed in movies, by banging on the equipment with a closed fist). Forget all that.
With a little consulting from people who actually understand this stuff, it could have been made a little more realistic, but realism didn’t seen ti be the film makers’ goal–magic was. It’s a movie about dreams, and governments, and the intrinsic conflict between the two. Forget the physics and politics, and focus on the metaphor.
In fact, the movie hit very close to home for me, because I and my family have sacrificed a great deal for a similar dream for many years, with success still eluding us (though perhaps that situation is improving). But nowhere to the same extent as Charles Farmer, and I’d like to think that (despite his movie success) I understand a little more about how politics, business and even rockets work than he seemed to.
In a sense, the way that the development of space will eventually play out is somewhere in between the two cartoonish extremes depicted in the movie. It won’t be done by a big-govenment program, and it won’t be done by a determined man in his garage. It will be done by private entities that are already formed and forming, that will take the smart things that NASA has learned over the years (like range safety, and not launching your rocket next to the house), and try to shed a lot of the unproductive ones that are driven by pork-driven politics and institutional inertia. The minimal hope for from government, for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial endeavors, is to facilitate their dreams, rather than hinder them.
[Note: I originally wrote this back on March 7th, but in going through old posts, I noticed that I never published it. The movie has been out a sufficient amount of time now that there are no spoilers…]
OK, so we went and saw the Astronaut Farmer this past weekend (I should add, parenthetically, that it’s the second movie I’ve seen in a theatre since I moved down here, two and a half years ago.
Forget about “suspension of disbelief.” Think complete abandonment of disbelief. On rocketry, on combustion, on radio communications, on basic physics, on how the government works, on how people work, on…almost anything correlating to reality that you want to imagine.
But I’m not panning the movie. As long as you follow my advice, and empty your head of the notion that this is a movie about how a private citizen might actually get into space, it’s an enjoyable flick, and entertaining for the whole family (well, other than a couple naughty words).
Yes, I could spend the evening disquisiting on all the things they got wrong in the flick–the notion that one could launch from a barn without it being a smoldering crater afterward; the notion that a rocket could propel itself a few feet off the ground horizontally for miles, with gravity having no effect; the notion that a Mercury capsule could survive the end of that trip, after being launched off a cliff and roll amidst the desert scrub, intact with its occupant alive; the notion that the government would assemble a team from every conceivable (and several unconceivable) government entities in a high-school gym to determine whether or not he could fly; the notion that a man and his fifteen-year-old son could single (OK, dual) handedly assemble an Atlas-Mercury from antique spare parts scrounged from NASA junkyards and have it work, and not only work, but magically have it land where it took off (even though the original landed in the ocean, and not the desert southwest) after a power failure that was fixed (as all things are fixed in movies, by banging on the equipment with a closed fist). Forget all that.
With a little consulting from people who actually understand this stuff, it could have been made a little more realistic, but realism didn’t seen ti be the film makers’ goal–magic was. It’s a movie about dreams, and governments, and the intrinsic conflict between the two. Forget the physics and politics, and focus on the metaphor.
In fact, the movie hit very close to home for me, because I and my family have sacrificed a great deal for a similar dream for many years, with success still eluding us (though perhaps that situation is improving). But nowhere to the same extent as Charles Farmer, and I’d like to think that (despite his movie success) I understand a little more about how politics, business and even rockets work than he seemed to.
In a sense, the way that the development of space will eventually play out is somewhere in between the two cartoonish extremes depicted in the movie. It won’t be done by a big-govenment program, and it won’t be done by a determined man in his garage. It will be done by private entities that are already formed and forming, that will take the smart things that NASA has learned over the years (like range safety, and not launching your rocket next to the house), and try to shed a lot of the unproductive ones that are driven by pork-driven politics and institutional inertia. The minimal hope for from government, for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial endeavors, is to facilitate their dreams, rather than hinder them.